Your MSP is confronted with more hurdles today than before. And your assessment process is probably making things even worse.
If you’re getting fewer prospect sign ups, less people interested in a network assessment, or are having a hard time getting front of the right decisionmaker, you’re probably running into a failing network assessment process.
If you’re finding selling harder through the pandemic or spend valuable time in the day compiling long network assessment reports, are getting pushback to having a technician go onsite to run an assessment, or even that they can’t even run the assessment tool because they don’t want to alarm their current IT provider, cybersecurity selling in 2021 doesn’t have to be this way!
In fact, MSPs have started to revolutionize their audit and sales process to sidestep all of these problems. They’ve even been able to ensure that the decisionmakers in the prospect’s organizations are vested in reviewing the reports and suggestions they have to review during the readout.
What has specifically killed deals for MSPs prior to 2021?
Getting administrator credentials—I experienced this pain point so many times, I can’t imagine running an MSP in 2021 with the surge of remote working. I winced every time I asked for administrator credentials. And then breathed a big sigh or relief when they agreed. The problem? The incumbent IT team always knew something was up. Even when I had the client lie by saying they needed a routine insurance evaluation, I knew I was starting our relationship off with lies (this always came back to haunt me later on).
Long technical reports— I’ve many times bombarded my prospects with a laundry list of issues we found on their network—many of which were issues they either did not care about or didn’t understand. Rather than focus on volume of issues, why not focus on a couple security issues that are important to them (passwords, PII found on the network, etc.) ? Then bring up even bigger issues within those contexts (like firewalls and antivirus not working)?
Long assessment processes—when I was running my MSP (and still in many MSPs today), I see long assessment processing time because reports are tedious to generate and auditing tools are a hassle to run on a client network. What MSPs are focused on today is letting a few key users click a link, simulating what hackers would find during a phishing attack. Most decisionmakers are compelled to take this irresistible offer just for their peace of mind (without getting IT involved!).
Onsite time—to run our assessments, we used to dispatch a tech onsite to the prospect. That not only risked the tech oversharing information about our company. Many prospects were unhappy and unwilling to allow onsite access. MSPs today are using easy to run remote tools. Why not have a couple users click on a link and get all the information you once needed to go onsite?
Charging for assessments—because assessments were a huge up-front investment for our MSP (and many of our colleagues), we tried charging for the assessments. That completely narrowed the number of takers. Since the assessment was an integral part of our sales process, we drastically reduced the number of leads in our pipeline. After spending a few years of charging, I started offering the free time-consuming assessments again. MSPs today are eliminating all of the work with reporting and assessments. They are opting to have done for you reports that simply completely tailored to their lead. The only work they do is share a link with a few key people on their prospect’s team.
Devoid of decisionmakers—when I would go onsite for the readout meetings to the assessment, I often was stood up by the decisionmaker. Instead, I’d be asked to sit down with an administrative assistant or other employee. Hours of work wasted! I soon learned that having a meeting without the right people completely kills the deal. I’d simply walk out of meetings if the right people weren’t planning on attending. MSPs today are getting those people into the meetings by getting them interested in seeing what a hacker could glean from their computer (yes, you make sure and evaluate their computer). These decisionmakers are always the most engaged on the calls—asking questions, mainly about why is this happening?
Bottom line: the old way of selling managed services is failing.
We all know that the MSP assessment process has a TON of bugs. Why hasn’t anyone helped fix the issue?
Because the vendors selling you auditing tools have not run MSPs or they aren’t interested in investing in their products—they are content with their cash cow.
How can you start cleaning up your sales and assessment process?
- Find ways to eliminate having to involve your technicians—it slows your daily operations and makes your sales team completely dependent on expensive technical resources
- Remove administrator credentials from your assessment process—the more you ask of your client, the worse your impression will be.
- Make the issues relate to decisionmakers—the more you’re listing out laundry lists of patches, accounts, or outdated software and operating systems, the less time you’re hitting the issues that your prospect is actually concerned with. The more you can relate issues back to their experience, the clearer and more compelling your presentation will be.
- Test a product that was built for MSPs that takes into account their sales process. Sign up for a 43-minute cyber stack evaluation to see how a better-than-an-assessment, penetration test could get you into more opportunities with your prospects AND sell your clients on your cybersecurity stack.
